Dot brand use cases

The new dot brand domain space offers brands the opportunity to reshape their entire online ecosystem, to find new ways of marketing their businesses online, and to develop new ways to improve customer engagement, data management and security.

Currently 565 dot brands are delegated and between them they have registered over 17,000 domains, with over 8000 redirects currently in use. The top three industries for dot brands remain Banking & Financial, Automotive, and Internet.

MICRO SITES

Dot brand registries offer flexibility and cost savings to brand and marketing departments: adding domains into your own registry is simple and inexpensive.

Microsites promoting specific events, products and promotions have proliferated and are one of the major uses for dot brands.Bentley recently launched the micrositeextraordinaryjourneys.bentleythat tells stories about the design, experience, craftsmanship, technology and luxury aspects of their cars, and is related to the 100th anniversary celebrations of the company. This micro site has even featured in advertising billboards across the UK.

Another recent microsite is ai.aws from Amazon. This site details the benefits of AWS’s artificial intelligence and the capabilities of machine learning. Similarly to the Bentley example, it is a highly designed microsite with a number of pages and resources.

Some brands are steering potential recruits to their dot brand TLDs. They are also using dot brands in marketing campaigns to attract young people to apply for jobs. Jobs.intel is a recent example of a jobs portal by technology company Intel.

Another recent microsite is Assistant.sncf from SNCF, the French train operator, which promotes their new mobile app.

REDIRECTS

Redirects are a very popular strategy for dot brands. The speed at which brand owners can register domains in their TLDs means they can react quickly to new trends – perfect for tapping into the marketing potential of new redirects or for clear and catchy use on social media.

Planet.swatch redirects to the Swatch homepage, while asia.bloomberg redirects to the Asian news site. German pharmaceutical company Stada have launched stada.stada that redirects to their homepage.

BIG LAUNCHES

A small number of brands have already migrated core parts of their online presence to their dot brand TLDs. Global consultancy firm KPMG migrated their main global corporate website over tohome.kpmg in August 2019. KPMG are the first Big Four firm to migrate their corporate website to their dot brand, and they said in a press release:

The move enhances the KPMG brand through a strong, simplified name, and provides end users with a level of assurance that any site that ends with .kpmg is owned and operated by KPMG.

Since the top level domain can only be used by KPMG, visitors to sites that use the new top level domain can easily confirm its authenticity and be assured that the information they contain is reliable and secure.